Genre is essentially a form of marketing, where publishers and consumers both have a reasonably defined idea of what the product should consist of, what its parameters are, etc. An example is that magic may exist in Fantasy, but it won't typically appear in Science Fiction unless it is given a rationalistic justification. Works that preceded the genre-market are not typically considered genre, and so Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells were not SF writers, but Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and so on were, even if the works themselves dealt with the same themes regardless of what market they were writing for.

There was a time long ago when Science Fiction did have an unenviable reputation as being a ghetto of sub-par writing, defined by pulp magazine covers of alien monsters menacing beautiful girls, but no reasonably informed person would hold that view today. In cinema no A-list director holds Science Fiction in low regard, and directors like Kubrick or Tarkovsky, two of the best directors who ever lived, did some of their most ambitious works in this form. Fellini's "Eight and a Half" is about a director who is trying to make a Science Fiction film.

The problem here isn't that Science Fiction is genre, it is that 'literature' has become genre, with its own set of clichés, narrow conventions, market orientation, low ambition, and hermetic disinterest in the outside world. And like the broader genre definitions we are familiar with, 'literature' has its own sub-genres, like 'black literature', 'women's literature', 'gay literature', and of course 'chick lit'. The Booker Prize, like most of the so-called serious literary prizes distributes prizes according to who's turn it is this time.

Glancing through the list of Booker Prize Winners, while there are a few old stalwarts like Kingsley Amis and William Golding to give credibility to the proceedings, when you click on the more obscure ones at random, you quickly see the cause of their obscurity. Such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Line_of_Beauty

Or how about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inheritance_of_Loss

You could write this stuff with a multiple choice card system, Illegal Immigrant->Woman->Single Mother->Raped by father, etc. or Male->Black->Gay->Brutalist Council Estate->Police Brutality, etc.

And clicking on a few of the others at random them to be the usual misery-lit grouching about childhood.

But what did you expect from an award that the likes of Margaret Atwood would win?